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I assume you’re a well-informed poster. You and I and everyone on this board surely knows well that ‘Free Palestine’ groups claim to be anti-colonialist, anti-racist and leftist, plus supporters of the concept of national liberation and also of BLM, for example. Their opposition to Israel’s policies rather obviously stem from this ideology and not from a general hatred of the Jewish people and not from a hard opposition towards the concept of a Jewish state in itself, as they view Israel as a white supremacist, unrepentant, aggressor settler state, and many of their members and supporters are themselves Jews. We can, of course, make all sorts of criticism of them, but this needs to be admitted. I guess we can go so far as to call them anti-white, since they see Israeli settlers and Zionists as white. At the same time, not only is their rhetoric not anti-Semitic, they do not tolerate anti-Semitism either, especially not within their own ranks.
Obviously these groups have existed before October 7th, in fact they have existed for a long time, and their ideological rhetoric against Israeli colonialism was also deployed against the US political system, which they view as structurally racist and neo-colonialist. Back when BLM was more relevant, it was the latter that was getting these activists more media attention, and I can only assume that this made many people forget that these groups are also anti-Zionist, and that accusations of anti-Semitism do not work against them at all, for the simple reason that they genuinely do not see themselves as anti-Semitic and thus do not consider themselves compelled to apologize. It’s similar to the case of the ‘Democrats are the real racists’ narrative, which does not work on Democrats one bit.
To the extent that US political opposition towards Zionism and the Zionist lobby exists outside the leftist, anti-racist, anti-colonialist milieu, I think it’s fair to say that it all stems from isolationism, to the extent that it still even exists. And the common attribute of isolationists is that they wish to isolate the US from other conflict regions in the world as well, not just Israel, so I don’t think accusations of anti-Semitism apply in their case either.
In what ways do they not? Up until being forced by the new administration, elite colleges were quite happy to tolerate anti-Semitism. Jeremiah Wright and Louis Farrakhan come to mind.
The exception being that any critique of George Soros (or I guess now his son) does get coded as unacceptable anti-Semitic, which is... telling, I think.
Indeed. The truth of the statement doesn't matter. Whether they're anti-Semitic or anti-civilization, neither accusation has an effect; it just slides off the closed ideological defense system.
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IIRC George Wallace in the 1960s claimed that he was not racist, just that segregation was the natural order of things.
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I tend to disagree with this. For example, it's no secret that Palestinian Arabs living in Lebanon (some have been their for generations) are not allowed to be Lebanese citizens; barred from various professions; etc. And yet campus Leftists don't seem to bother with "Lebanese Apartheid Week." In fact, there are many minority groups all over the world the Left doesn't seem to care about all that much. Heck, I even read that there is actual slavery of black people still going on in 2026 in some places. There is some degree of objection to what China is doing in Tibet and the western provinces, but it's nowhere near the volume of anti-Israel activities.
So it seems pretty clear that, even if one ignores the fact that Jews are actually an indigenous people of the Levant, there is a lot more going on than just generalized opposition to ethnic nationalism, colonialism, and so on.
Kind of interesting since Lebanese-Americans almost code as white in modern progressive terms, because so many were Christians that immigrated fairly early and integrated quickly- Jamie Farr and Casey Kasem come to mind.
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True. At the same time, nobody is claiming that Lebanon is our greatest ally, the only democracy in the Middle East and the bastion of Judeo-Christian culture.
Before the Lebanese Civil War (1975), IIRC Lebanon had a reputation as one of the more relatable countries in the region: stable, multicultural, mostly Christian. Incidentally, that civil war was in part downstream of regional Palestinian migration and nationalism.
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